For 1st time in 2 decades, mass protests erupt among Israel’s Arab citizens
Demonstrations on Tuesday night quickly turned into violent confrontations with Israeli police and right-wing Israelis staging counter-demonstrations.
RAMLE, Israel —The escalating conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has sparked an outbreak of increasingly volatile protests by Israel’s own Arab citizens, who have taken to the streets this week in numbers unseen in two decades.
While unrest in the occupied territories is not uncommon, the outpouring of support among Arab citizens for Palestinians in Jerusalem and Gaza and the venting of anger in Israeli cities with large Arab populations pose a rare challenge on Israel’s home front.
In predominantly Arab cities and those with mixed Arab and Jewish populations, demonstrations on Tuesday night quickly turned into violent confrontations with Israeli police and right-wing Israelis staging counter-demonstrations. Police fired tear gas and rubber-coated bullets, while looting and arson attacks spread.
“It was like a war here,” said Yousef, 35, a resident of the mixed city of Ramle in central Israel, who declined to give his last name for fear of arrest. He accused Israeli police of failing to stop religious Jews from assaulting people outside his mosque and instead attacking local Arabs.
In Ramle, videos circulated of right-wing Israelis pelting cars with Arab drivers. In nearby Lod, close to Israel’s international airport, Arabs attacked several synagogues and shops. And clashes and rioting also erupted in other Israeli cities, including Haifa, Acre and Sakhnin.
By Wednesday night, bands of Arab residents, some with bats and rocks, had begun guarding their streets in Lod against roaming groups of Jewish Israelis, some armed with bats and guns. These right-wing Israelis, many young and from Jewish settlements in the West Bank, had come to Lod, saying they wanted to protect Jewish residents.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday declared a state of emergency in Lod, site of some of the worst violence following the funeral of a 25-year-old Arab Israeli who was shot dead Monday night. It was the first time a state of emergency had been declared in an Arab community since 1966, when Israel lifted restrictions on the movement of some Arabs put in place at Israel’s independence in 1948.
Israeli border police, who typically patrol the Israelioccupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, were deployed in Lod.
Police erected roadblocks to prevent people from entering the city.
Israeli Police Spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said 270 people were arrested Tuesday across the country in “wide-scale disturbances and riots.” In some cases, he said Jewish residents, who had armed themselves with bats and other weapons, were “walking in the streets to protect themselves.”
“We have not seen this kind of violence since October 2000,” said Israeli Police Chief Kobi Shabtai, referring to the Palestinian mass uprising, which spanned five years during which thousands of Israelis and Palestinians were killed.
The unrest came as Israel and Islamic militants in Gaza continued to exchange rocket fire and airstrikes in some of the worst crossborder violence in years. At least 48 Gazans, including 14 children, and six Israelis, including one teenage girl, have been killed, according to officials on the two sides.
The surge in violence came amid ongoing efforts by Israeli settlers to evict several Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem and fierce clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police at and around the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.
Hassan Jabreen, the General Director of Adalah, the Legal Center For Arab Minority Rights in Israel, said he had not seen this kind of “fear and concern for safety among Arab populations” in two decades.
But the unrest in ArabIsraeli communities reflects longer-standing grievances about their status and security within Israel, according to analysts and Arab activists.
The protests are in part “because of the anger that’s been building up years and years,” said Rami Younes, an Arab writer and filmmaker who is originally from Lod. “It feels like there’s a new generation, which is fearless and direct, which is fed up with the aggression and oppression of Arabs.”
Arabs make up 20 percent of Israel’s population and are the descendants of Palestinians who remained inside Israel’s borders following the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. They have long complained of what they say is institutionalized discrimination against them.
Jabreen said that Netanyahu, his public security minister and police share responsibility for the latest unrest because of rhetoric inciting division between Arabs and Jews. Israeli authorities reject that accusation.
On Wednesday, Minister of Public Security Amir Ohana defended those “lawabiding citizens” who carry weapons to assist the police and he criticized the arrest of three suspects in the Lod killing on Monday night.
As Lod braced for more unrest on Wednesday, Arafat Ismail prepared to lay to rest his brother-in-law, Khalil Awaad, and 16-yearold niece, Nadine Awaad. who were killed early in the morning when a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip struck beside their home.
The family lives in an Arab village called Dahamash down an unpaved road between Ramle and Lod. Ismail said that for seven years, since the last war between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza, his village has been petitioning various authorities for bomb shelters, which none of the homes have. Israel does not officially recognize the village, where Ismail’s family has long lived.
“We’ve requested that there be infrastructure, shelters, just like in the Jewish communities,” he said, leaning on an aging green walker. He added, “Why not me? Do missiles not target us?”
The impact of the rocket had struck Awaad and his daughter, who had been sheltering beside two now largely incinerated cars. While Israeli authorities urge residents to remain indoors when air-raid sirens sound, Ismail said people in his community often prefer to be outside because they worry the walls of their home are not strong enough to survive a blast.
As an Arab citizen of Israel, he said, “You exist and are invisible at the same time.”